A way back, but not so very long ago, poor, unknown singers could become famous expressing themselves directly to their public without a keyboard — or a password. Hard to imagine? Think of it as tweeting with … the vocal cords.

Bessie Smith did not, and probably would never tweet. She roared, she rasped, she occasionally cooed a bit, but always in the service of an appetite for life that brought her to the top of the blues-singing heap, and a restricted but still lavish career living out her passions in song.

Angelo Parra’s “The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith,” currently at People’s Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, allows those of us — willingly or unwillingly stuck in our digital age — a vivid reminder of what a life singing the blues in the last century meant to an African-American woman in terms of both personal and artistic sacrifice.

The “Empress of the Blues” came from poverty to become one of the highest-paid African-American entertainers in the U.S. She learned her craft in speakeasies and smoky clubs in front of calculating strangers, was beaten and cheated on by her men, and cheated on them. She lived the blues; she sang the blues. After she died in a car crash, more than 7,000 gathered in Philadelphia for her funeral. She was buried in Sharon Hill in Delaware County, where her headstone, paid for in part by Janis Joplin, can be seen today.

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It’s not easy to explain to younger theatergoers how musical fame was achieved in the first half of the 20th century. When Smith sang in segregated theaters throughout the South, word of mouth created interest. Ok, that makes sense. She was ambitious, so she eventually got a recording contract. A what? Well, a company might pay her a little money, then record her voice and inscribe it onto disks made of industrial plastic. People then bought the “record” of her voice in a store and played it for themselves and friends on a sort of electrical megaphone they also had to purchase. If she was lucky, the company gave her a share of the sale of the disks. If people liked what they heard there would be concerts that increased exponentially in size, generating more money, more advertising and more fans.

This exercise in nostalgia leads to the point that today, a singing career can be assembled IKEA-like out of the fragments of any of those former benchmarks of success. Talent is a nice thing to have, but not a necessity. Advertising only goes so far before it vanishes like cigarette smoke. Word of mouth is fine, but still just air. You need real electricity, the kind that powers Pandora. So Pandora promotes Pink, YouTube begets Bieber and Twitter touts Taylor Swift(ly) around the world. Today, racism can be ignored, personal failings hailed and even minimal talent strung out long enough to become a sign of strength. The path to success has many roads but the same destination — once you begin you must succeed, for only very strong individuals can turn their backs on fame. And careers flash and fade overnight.

Miche Braden, the singer who made a mesmerizing Billie Holliday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” 25 years ago at People’s Light, returns to remind us why Bessie Smith was the first woman to achieve national and eventually international stardom singing the blues. Parra and director Joe Brancato place her in 1937, the night before her death, in a Memphis “buffet flat” which was a private residence where African-Americans could eat, drink, drug and enjoy each other’s company for a time outside the strictures of segregation. Braden is a formidable presence who dominates the floor of this hideaway, belts out many of her most famous songs, reminisces about her R-rated relationships with both men and women, and can only be slowed by the booze, a familiar device which the playwright uses to keep her stories flowing even as her singing loses its hurricane force.

There was an organic quality to a career like Smith’s; it rose and fell, a soufflé-like beneficiary and victim of the timing of musical taste. But we can never forget she was a woman largely alone in a business dominated by men in a society where she had to sing, eat, drink, sleep and socialize inside boxes formed by racial segregation. Her genius was that she took these limitations and turned them into art.

Fortunately, both the real Bessie and Braden attract some first-rate accompanists, and this production benefits enormously from the talent and timing of three of the best: pianist Aaron Graves, bassist Jim Hankins and sax man Anthony Nelson, Jr. These cynical sidemen provide just the right amount of honest banter to keep Bessie’s sharp and equally truthful tongue in her cheek and her voice rooted in the harsh truth of the blues.

“The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith” runs through Nov. 24 at People’s Light & Theatre Company in Malvern. For tickets, go to Peopleslight.org, or call 610-644-3500.